Google says Chrome can now better protect you while maintaining your privacy

Google has added real-time browsing protection to Chrome and claims it will protect your privacy. This feature, which Google says hides your visited URLs, is now available on Chrome's default Standard mode of Safe Browsing.

For years, Chrome's Safe Browsing feature automatically adds potentially unsafe URLs to a list stored by Google on your device. Whenever a user visits a site, Google checks the URL against that list and issues a warning. The problem is that Google updates this locally stored database every 30 to 60 minutes. Given that most dangerous sites exist for less than 10 minutes these days, many unsafe sites are removed.

Safe Browsing's opt-in Advanced Protection mode tackles this by using Google's Safe Browsing server-side database, which catches unsafe URLs very quickly in real time. Yet users must provide more security-related data to Google for full protection, which is why it's an opt-in mode.

Google claims that the new version of Safe Browsing solves this problem with an API that hides the URLs of visited sites from Google. Now, Google says it will check in real time for sites it couldn't find in its database and then send an encrypted version of the URL to Fastly's independently operated privacy servers.

Google says the privacy server will then strip the URL of any potential user identifiers such as IP address and will not be able to decrypt the URL. Later, it will send it via a TLS connection to Safe Browsing's server-side database that matches your request with requests sent by other Chrome users.

Safe browsing must then be able to decrypt the URL in its full hash form – which still hides the URL – and check it against its list. If Safe Browsing finds a mail, Google says it will only send the encrypted hash form to Google, and Google will then warn the user.

As a result, throughout the process, Google claims that your browsing activity remains private; No single party will be able to see both your IP address and the hash prefix of the URL. At the same time, Google says that it should be able to stop 25 percent more phishing attempts.

Although both the Standard and Advanced modes can now perform checks in real-time, Google claims that the Advanced version offers more security. This is because it comes with additional features, such as AI to prevent attacks, deeper file scans, and additional protection from dangerous Chrome extensions.

The new real-time detection feature for Standard Mode is currently available on Chrome for desktop and iOS and will be available on Android later this month.